Working at SEER Interactive, you hear a lot of talk about doing “RCS”. RCS stands for “Real Company Stuff”, where companies do real strategies that add value, instead of “Fake Company Stuff” where the sole purpose is to try and quickly increase search engine rankings.

An example of “RCS” could be creating an interactive visualization of industry data your company has collected and letting industry journalists know about it. By contrast, “FCS” is doing large numbers of spam comments, spinning press release articles, and other similar tactics that exist only to manipulate search engines.

How to find links – If you create an infographic, you should be sure to include an embed code so that people can post the graphic on their own site. Posting your graphic on the list of sites that Paddy gave makes it more likely that your graphic will be found and used by others. Sites that feature your infographic don’t always link back to your site. To find these opportunities, use Google reverse image search to see who’s using the graphic but not linking.

2) Brand Link Building

No matter how big or small your company, you will be surprised at how often your brand is mentioned online. It is important to find these mentions, not only to try and get links, but also to understand who and how people are talking about your brand.

Like infographics, high quality images are great way to connect with your audience. An image link strategy works especially well for companies that already produce high quality photos of their merchandise – like gear, food, and clothes.

How to find links – Like the previous strategies, using Google reverse image search can be extremely effective at finding people who are using your high quality images but not linking to your site as the source.

4) Protecting Your Quality Content

When you do RCS, you are producing quality content. Unfortunately, others around the web will borrow it without citing you as the source. We don’t always want people to take our content, but if they do, we want to make sure they cite us as the source.

How to find links – There are ways to make sure that high quality content gets properly attributed when used by others.:

Google Alerts– Take a snippet of your content and make an alert for when someone uses it.

Nice article, Ben. RCS is definitely what people who want to stay white hat (and people who want to improve their rankings!) should be thinking about. I’m curious, though; those infographic sites are essentially image directories, right? How are they any “less spammy” than the thousands of article directory sites our there?

Thank you for your question about submitting to infogrpaphic / high quality photo sites VS submitting to directories.

The difference between submitting to infographic sites VS spammy directories is the goal behind the submission. The goal for submitting infographics and high quality images is NOT to get links from the site, but instead to find people who will use the content to add value to their own site.

The purpose behind submitting to spammy directories was solely to get links.

Also whenever you create an infographic you should not solely rely on the sites listed. You should be contacting websites with a community that would be interested in your content as well.